Spring is here. For Afghanistan that means more violence by the Taliban and other terrorists – and more refugees leaving our country on small boats for the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

As a proud patriot it gives me nothing but shame to see the name Afghanistan ever more prominent in British Home Office data sets on illegal immigration. The latest published figures show that in 2023 Afghanistan was the source of more immigrants reaching Britain across the Channel on ‘small boats’ than any other nation: 5,545 out of 29,437 – roughly one in five.

The Taliban are a powerful pump for the illegal immigrants roiling British politics

A year earlier, Afghanistan was second only to Albania. Now our country is in a league of its own, top of the pile. If you include all other routes of immigration beyond the sea lanes, again, Afghanistan tops the list for 2023 with 17 per cent of what British civil servants categorise ‘irregular arrivals’. You can’t really address immigration problems in Britain without talking about Afghanistan.

Small boat crossings towards the UK surge in spring, when better weather calms the treacherous waters of the English Channel. It is also no coincidence that spring means the arrival of ‘fighting season’ in Afghanistan, when winter’s grip eases across our often-rugged landscape and the Taliban go on the offensive.

Spring is when the Taliban deploy heavily-armed gunmen, brainwashed by years of re-education at Taliban-controlled madrassahs or religious schools, to kill opponents, torture innocent civilians and bully women and girls. Taliban rule is shored up by violence and spring is when that cycle of violence resets.

So spring has become ‘fleeing season’ for millions of Afghans. Migrants go to neighbouring states such as Iran and Pakistan, yet, as the Home Office data shows, many thousands set their minds on more distant sanctuary.

Before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan was not even top five on those UK immigration tables. In 2018, only 3 people from Afghanistan arrived over the water. It’s clear, then, that the main driver for immigration from my country to Britain now is the existence of the Taliban and the foreign terror outfits they now allow to wreak havoc in Afghanistan.

The British government currently aims to mop up the flow of ‘small boat’ arrivals, not least with the policy involving transfers to Rwanda. But if water is spurting from a broken tap, you don’t just wipe up what has been spilled. To repair what is broken, you must turn off the mains. In the case of Afghanistan, it is clear the Taliban – brutal, misogynistic, backward – are a powerful pump for the illegal immigrants roiling British politics.

Britain’s leadership saw this clearly in the years when Albanian arrivals surged to the top of the arrivals’ list. The solution in that instance was plain enough: cut a deal with the Albanian government directly.

But Albania has a government Britain could do business with. The same is not true in Afghanistan. The Taliban is in power but it is not a government. It is a cabal of zealots interested solely in control, with neither the capacity nor any interest in providing the essential components of nationhood: political stability, a functioning economy, shared national values, social cohesion, sustainable and attainable progress. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan relies not on cooperation but on coercion. And it is that coerciveness that drives the exodus and the small boats problem.

There is a way out of this. There is another way to turn off the tap of illegal immigration from the current lead nation. And that is to back the opposition and resistance movements of Afghanistan which are growing in support throughout the country.

The resistance movement, initiated by the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), is the grain around which the pearl of a new Afghanistan will develop. That grain is hard: their commanders defy the Taliban more and more, and ahead of the fighting season they have already launched several successful pre-emptive strikes, in different provinces with a focus on Kabul.

The twenty years of the Republic of Afghanistan, which began with the ousting of the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda acolytes after 9/11 and ended with those chaotic scenes at Kabul airport in August 2021, taught us many things. But the most important message was that the old system of power being divided by corrupt and incompetent figures is doomed.

The resistance acknowledges that major mistakes were made during that period at national and international levels. Those errors must be identified and not repeated. What the resistance now offers is hope that our compatriots can take ownership of their lives again, that a father can watch his daughter blossom at university, that hard work in the fields to provide for a family is not an indentured life sentence but an economic opportunity.

Even more importantly, the resistance offers the kind of hope that will reassure the people of Afghanistan to stay and to build, not to leave and risk everything on a leaking boat across the English Channel.